


Monster Hunting Bonding Time!

by SpinelRomalina



Category: Dragon Quest Series, Dragon Quest VIII
Genre: Gen, If You Squint - Freeform, eight is not named eight, hints of kukuzeshi, pre-relationship kukuzeshi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23439436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpinelRomalina/pseuds/SpinelRomalina
Summary: The party is stopped in Peregrin Quay on their way back north, and Angelo takes the opportunity to get closer to Jessica. Jessica, amazingly, is okay with this.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 4





	Monster Hunting Bonding Time!

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first published fic! Finally! After I've been psyching myself up for months! Seriously though, this is basically just Angelo being unprepared for what bonding with Jessica entails and being lowkey #relatable.

At first glance, Jessica was nothing new or special. She was nothing Angelo hadn't seen before. She wasn't the first beautiful woman in his life and she wasn't the first to vocally and constantly denounce his charms no matter what he tried. At first glance, Jessica was just the same as many other women he'd met.

But if you bothered looking deeper, that was when she caught your interest. And Angelo had bothered looking deeper. What else could he do, stuck on the road with her, a bandit who'd never heard of baths, a royal guardsman who either didn't know how to hold a conversation or flat-out refused to, a self-absorbed king, and a princess transformed into a horse? Almost nothing, as he'd learned. So he'd stuck to pestering Jessica and slowly wearing her down to the point she wouldn't roll her eyes every time he opened his mouth. And in the process, he just happened to learn some interesting things about her.

Her brother was dead, another victim of Dhoulmagus. She'd come with Alan and his crew against the wishes of her mother (guilt flashing in her eyes as she admitted this), who was more concerned with tradition than vengeance. She'd been forbidden from practicing magic as a child, and most of her spells had either been taught to her in secret by her late brother or picked up from her recent travels. She was a fast learner, and very eager too. She'd been pestering Yangus for quite some time to teach her hand-to-hand combat, and he was quickly reaching the point of saying yes just to shut her up for a bit. She was a voracious reader, and no book or manuscript was safe with her around (he'd awoken more than once to find her sitting on the floor by his pack, silently reading yet another text he thought he'd successfully hidden from her). Despite the way men and women alike leered and drooled over her, she'd apparently never realized just how much her body could be used to her advantage before leaving home. She was a competitive person, constantly challenging herself to outdo her companions and getting frustrated when she couldn't (who in their right mind would expect an inexperienced young sorceress to go toe-to-toe with a highwayman ten years her senior and with combat experience to match?). She hated mundane or repetitive work, and often complained when she and Angelo were assigned to laundry and weapon upkeep when the party stopped for a few days to rest and restock while Alan and Yangus went out and got supplies. She loved King Trode's alchemy pot almost as much as she loved the books on magical theory he'd taken with him when he fled his home, and spent a great deal of time seeking out new ingredients to upgrade their arms and armor. And she didn't mind Angelo at all when she was preoccupied with reading or with the alchemy pot.

Angelo took advantage of those moments of peace, just to be near Jessica. Not that he especially liked her or felt a closeness to her, no matter how he may tease her. It was just better for everyone's sanity if she could learn to see him in a less antagonistic light. And if it meant sitting around quietly while she studied the genetic makeup of a slime, then so be it. Lately, she was even clearing a space for him to sit with her while she worked.

Today was no different. They were stopped in Peregrin Quay, waiting for the ferry to come back around to take them to the northern continent. Alan and Yangus were at market right now, still haggling for better prices on the fresh vegetables that Alan insisted on feeding to Medea, as if she wasn't a horse, capable of eating most kinds of vegetation. Angelo and Jessica, for their part, had already done up the laundry and cleaned and repaired the armor and weapons, which left them free to pursue their own interests for the evening (he would say night as well, but he'd learned that Alan was very strict about when they all came back to their lodgings, and their curfew was always shortly after sundown). As usual, Jessica was taking advantage of the guidebooks and research documents on the bookshelf in the inn, and as usual, Angelo sat and watched her as she read.

Yes, things were all very normal, including Angelo's drowsiness as time wore on, until it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. Things were normal until the moment they weren't. Which is to say, the moment Jessica snapped her book shut loudly, jolting Angelo to attention and causing him to look at her a bit strangely, trying to wordlessly convey a feeling of 'what the fuck did you do that for?'.

Jessica only smiled at him, and he began to feel a bit uneasy. Jessica never smiled at him unless she was wishing him a long and painful death. He tried to think of what he could have done to earn his companion's ire, but came up short. It had to be something he'd done since they'd sat down, as Jess wasn't the type to bottle her anger and release it later. He hadn't been moving that much or breathing that loud, surely, he was always very certain not to disturb her while she read—

"Are you hungry, Angelo? I'll buy dinner if you want." Oh no. She was definitely getting ready to kill him. That sugar-sweetness in her voice, the gleam in her eyes, the sway of her hips as she walked away, she was clearly going to kill him. And he couldn't even figure out why.

* * *

Perhaps he'd overreacted. Still, he couldn't have expected this, he told himself as he looked over his shoulder, watching Jessica pace impatiently along the grass. How could he have guessed she wanted him to join her in hunting monsters? It wasn't as though she'd ever given any indication of enjoying his company enough to want to spend more time with him.

"Come  _ on _ ," Jessica growled. "Where  _ is  _ it..."

'Where is what?', Angelo was tempted to ask. Instead, what came out was, "It's dusk."

"I don't care," Jessica snapped back. "Alan can wait. I'm not leaving until I find one."

"One  _ what _ , Je—"

He was interrupted by the melodic laugh of a dingaling. He groaned internally. "Here, I'll get rid of it, then you can go back to your monster hunt..." He rose from the rock he was perched on to shoo the stupid bell. Jessica threw her hand out to stop him.

"Don't you dare." She leapt for the animated annoyance, sword in hand.

* * *

Angelo sighed, laying down on the cool grass to watch the starry sky. "Would you like to actually tell me what this is all about now?"

Jessica didn't look up from the jar she'd stolen from a jargon corpse. "Mmmhm." She scooped up a handful of its contents, rubbing the grains of sand between her fingers and watching them fall back into the container.

"You know Alan's probably gone through the whole port looking for us, right?"

"Mhm."

"We're going to be in so much trouble when he finds us."

" _ If _ he finds us," Jessica muttered, seemingly on autopilot. She shifted to sit cross-legged on the ground, hunched over the jar still in her lap.

"Jess," Angelo nudged her with a boot. "Seriously, talk."

Jessica grumbled before putting aside the jar and flopping down beside Angelo. "No one actually knows what's inside a jargon's jar, you know. It's agreed that it's some kind of sand, but no one knows its full properties." She rolls over to look at Angelo, face serious. "Beyond that, what the hell kind of creature goes around eating sand? There are other cousins to jargons, and some of them reportedly heal themselves by draining their jar. Are their jars full of different mixtures? Is it all something unique to each subspecies? What the fuck?"

Angelo blinked, taken aback. "Uh," he said intelligently.

Jessica stared back, silently demanding an answer. He had none to give.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, Jessica rose. "Alright. You want to help me with this?" She offered him a hand up.

Angelo let himself be pulled to his feet. "With what?"

"Actually," she wandered over to the jargon's bloody corpse, "You don't get a choice. I brought you here for this."

"Um."

Jessica knelt down, grabbed the knife at her hip, and began dissecting the poor thing.

" _ Um _ ."

"I want you to take notes. If we have to keep traveling, we're going to come across those other subspecies I mentioned. I want to compare differences."

" _ UM _ ."

"There are writing supplies in my bag."

" **_UM_ ** ."

* * *

In the end, Angelo was right. Alan met them just inside the inn, looking for all the world like he wanted to kill them. Jessica was unapologetic, and Angelo simply let her talk them down from a sentence of ‘banned from leaving your rooms on the ferry and banned from riding in the carriage for a week after’ to ‘dinner and dish duty for a week’. Jessica pored over her journal whenever she got a chance, making additional entries and revisions every day.

But, most importantly, she never rolled her eyes whenever he suggested a new note.

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah, first fic done. Notes and concrit are always welcome, but a kudos does just as well for me! I have plenty more WIPs featuring the Dragon Quest VIII crew, so I'll probably upload those as soon as I can convince myself to finish them. If anyone's looking for some Heroes and Heroes II stuff, I'll try to get that up as well. Thanks for reading!


End file.
